Alexander Herzen

Works

• 1850From the Other Shore

  Dialogues and essays written after the defeat of 1848: history has no libretto, and no future goal justifies sacrificing living people.

• 1855My Past and Thoughts

  Memoirs written from 1852 to 1868, at once autobiography, portrait of Russian and European intellectual life and political reflection.

Position

Herzen is on the map as a political thinker of freedom. From Hegel, whose philosophy he called the “algebra of revolution”, and from French socialism, above all Proudhon, he took the hope of a free and just society. The defeat of 1848 led him in “From the Other Shore” to reject every philosophy of history that subordinates individuals to a goal, whether progress, the nation or the revolution: history improvises, and each generation is an end in itself. Disappointed with the European bourgeoisie, he placed his hope in the Russian peasant commune as the germ of a socialism that might spare Russia the stage of capitalism – the founding idea of Russian populism, as Andrzej Walicki has shown. Isaiah Berlin made Herzen known to English-speaking readers as a forerunner of pluralism and of his own critique of historical determinism. Herzen was no Marxist; his relations with Marx were hostile, and his late “Letters to an Old Comrade” (1869) warned Bakunin against a revolution that would destroy civilisation. Lenin claimed him in 1912 for the revolutionary tradition; critics have asked how far his commune socialism rested on an idealised picture of peasant life.

Life & context

Alexander Herzen was born in Moscow on 6 April 1812, the illegitimate son of the wealthy nobleman Ivan Yakovlev and Luise Haag from Stuttgart; his father gave him the invented surname Herzen. As a youth he and his friend Nikolai Ogarev swore on the Sparrow Hills to devote their lives to the cause of the Decembrists. He studied at Moscow University from 1829 to 1833, was arrested in 1834 as a member of a student circle and spent the following years in exile in Perm, Vyatka and Vladimir, later in Novgorod. In the 1840s he wrote philosophical essays on Hegel and on natural science and the novel “Who Is to Blame?” (1846). In 1847 he left Russia with his family, never to return, and witnessed the revolution of 1848 and its defeat in Paris. After his mother and a son drowned in a shipwreck in 1851 and his wife Natalia died in 1852, he moved to London. There he founded the Free Russian Press in 1853 and with Ogarev published the almanac “The Polar Star” and, from 1857, the newspaper “The Bell” (Kolokol), which was read secretly in Russia. His support for the Polish uprising of 1863 cost him many readers. He moved to Geneva in 1865 and died in Paris on 21 January 1870.

Further main works

• Dilettantism in Science (Diletantizm v nauke, 1843)
• Letters on the Study of Nature (Pis’ma ob izuchenii prirody, 1845–46)
• Who Is to Blame? (Kto vinovat?, 1846)
• The Russian People and Socialism (Le peuple russe et le socialisme, 1851)